The Gothic Novel & Frankenstein

1. The Gothic Novel & Frankenstein Brit Lit II Mr. Marcel

2. The Gothic Novel • Frankenstein is by no means the first Gothic novel. Instead, this novel is a compilation of Romantic and Gothic elements combined into a singular work with an unforgettable story. • The Gothic novel is unique because by the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein,several novels had appeared using Gothic themes, but the genre had only been around since 1754.

3. The Gothic Novel • The first Gothic horror novel was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1754. • The Castle of Otranto - The basic plot created many other gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines. • Perhaps the last type of novel in this mode was Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, published in 1847. In between 1754 and 1847, several other novels appeared using the Gothic horror story as a central story telling device, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis, and Melmouth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.

4. The Gothic Novel • The Gothicnovel: set in some exotic place like Italy and involving a heroine (or, less often, hero) in a struggle with the mysteriously evil and seemingly supernatural. • A landscape of vast dark forest with vegetation that bordered on excessive, concealed ruins with horrific rooms, monasteries and a forlorn character who excels at the melancholy.

5. The Gothic Novel • It is the predecessor to modern horror and, above all, has led to the common definition of "gothic" as being connected to the dark and horrific. • Prominent features of gothic novels included terror, mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted buildings, castles, trapdoors, doom, death, decay, madness, hereditary curses, and so on.

6. Mary Shelley • Mary Shelley was twenty when Frankenstein was published, twenty-four when her husband drowned; although she wrote a good many other things, her fame clearly rests on her archetypal tale of the monster and his creator.

7. Mary Shelley (1797-1851) • Mary Shelley was born in London, the second daughter of famed feminist, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraftand the equally famous liberal philosopher, anarchic & atheistic journalist, William Godwin. Her mother died eleven days after her birth. • Mary received an excellent education unusual for girls at the time. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a political radical and free-thinker like her father, when Percy and his first wife Harriet visited Godwin. Percy, unhappy in his marriage, began to visit Mary more frequently (and alone). • They eloped to France (Mary is 16). This was Percy’s second elopement. Upon their return several weeks later, the young couple were dismayed to find that Godwin, whose views on free love apparently did not apply to his daughter, refused to see them.

8. Mary Shelley • Percy exulted that Mary was "one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy.“ They did have their differences. • During May of 1816, the couple traveled to Lake Geneva to summer near the famous and scandalous poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Mary’s stepsister Claire had left her both pregnant and somewhat obsessed with him. • In terms of English literature, it was to be a productive summer. Percy began work on "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc." Mary will write Frankenstein here.

9. Mary Shelley • Forced to stay indoors on one particular evening, the group of young writers and intellectuals decided to have a ghost-story writing contest. Another guest, Dr. John Polidori, came up with The Vampyre, later to become a strong influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. • Other guests wove tales of equal horror, but Mary found herself unable to invent one. • That night, however, she had a “waking dream” where she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." Then she set herself to put the story on paper. In time it would be published as Frankenstein.

10. Mary Shelley • Returning to England in 1816, Mary and Percy were stunned by two family suicides in quick succession. • In November, Mary's older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, left the Godwin home and took her own life at a distant inn. • Only weeks later, Percy's first wife drowned herself in London's Hyde Park. Discarded and pregnant, she had not welcomed Percy's invitation to join Mary and himself in their new household. • On December 30, 1816, shortly after Harriet's death, Percy and Mary were married, now with Godwin's blessing. Their attempts to gain custody of Percy's two children by Harriet failed, but their writing careers enjoyed more success when, in the spring of 1817, Mary finished Frankenstein.

11. Mary Shelley • Over the following years, Mary's household grew to include her own children by Percy. Shelley moved his family from place to place, first in England and then in Italy. • Mary suffered the death of her infant daughter Clara outside Venice, after which her young son Will died too, in Rome, as Percy moved the household yet again. • By now Mary had resigned herself to her husband's self-centered restlessness and his romantic enthusiasms for other women. The birth of her only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley, consoled her somewhat for her losses.

12. Mary Shelley • Eventually the group settled in Lerici in Italy, but it was an ill-fated choice. It was here that Claire learned of her daughter's death at the Italian convent to which Byron had sent her, and that Mary almost died of a miscarriage. • And it was from here that Percy sailed up the coast to plan the founding of a journal with a group of friends. Caught in a storm on his return, he drowned at sea on July 8, 1822.

13. Mary Shelley • Mary was tireless in promoting her late husband's work, including editing and annotating unpublished material. Despite their troubled later life together, she revered her late husband's memory and helped build his reputation as one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. • But she also found occasions to write a few more novels. Critics say these works do not begin to approach the power and fame of Frankenstein. • The Last Man, a pioneering science fiction novel of the human apocalypse in the distant future, is, however, sometimes considered her best work.

14. Mary Shelley • In her journal, she writes about "the stresses of a life spent trying to measure up to the example, yet to escape the obloquy, of her parents and husband." • Mary Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, 1851 in London.

15. Gothic Traits in Frankenstein • Frankenstein is set in continental Europe, specifically Switzerland and Germany, where many of Shelley’s readers had not been. Further, the incorporation of the chase scenes through the Arctic regions takes us even further from England into regions unexplored by most readers. • Victor’s laboratory is the perfect place to create a new type of human being. Laboratories and scientific experiments were not known to the average reader, thus this was an added element of mystery and gloom.

16. Gothic Traits in Frankenstein • The thought of raising the dead would have made the average reader wince in disbelief and terror. Imagining Victor wandering the streets of Ingolstadt after dark on a search for body parts adds to the sense of revulsion purposefully designed to evoke from the reader a feeling of dread for the characters involved in the story.

17. Gothic Traits in Frankenstein • In the Gothic novel, the characters seem to bridge the mortal world and the supernatural world. • Frankenstein’s monster seems to have some sort of communication between himself and his creator, because the monster appears wherever Victor goes. • The monster also moves with amazing superhuman speed with Victor matching him in the chase towards the North Pole.

18. Mary Shelley • Shelley had incorporated a number of different sources into her work, not the least of which was the Promethean myth from Ovid. • The influence of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the book the 'creature' finds in the cabin, is also clearly evident within the novel.

19. “The Modern Prometheus" • The novel's subtitle • Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology, was the Titan who created mankind, and Victor's work by creating man by new means obviously reflects that creative work. More widely known is that Prometheus was the bringer of fire who took fire from the gods and gave it to man. Zeus then punished Prometheus by fixing him to a rock where each day a predatory bird came to devour his liver. • Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was a very different story. In this version Prometheus makes man from clay and water, again a very relevant theme to Frankenstein as Victor rebels against the laws of nature and as a result is punished by his creation.

20. “The Modern Prometheus" • Prometheus' relation to the novel can be interpreted in a number of ways. • For Romance era artists in general, Prometheus' gift to man compared with the two great utopian promises of the 18th century: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, containing both great promise and potentially unknown horrors. • Byron was particularly attached to the play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and Percy Shelley would soon write Prometheus Unbound.

21. What else is going on in literature, besides Romanticism and The Gothic Novel? • Jane Austen, the first great nineteenth-century novelist, was, in some sense the last great eighteenth-century novelist: ironic, comic, promoting the values of reason and restraint. • 1818, a year after Austen’s death, saw the (anonymous) publication of Frankenstein, quite a different sort of novel.

22. Group Work (Ch.1-11) • Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1 & 2). What was Victor’s mom like? How is Victor different from Elizabeth? (p. 22) • Find several instances of Victor’s hubris (p.39 and earlier). Where does this stem from? How does it lead to obsession? • Describe in detail the creation of the monster. How does Victor feel before, during, and after the process? • How are Mary Shelley’s descriptions of Nature quintessentially Romantic? Find at least 4 instances. In the beginning of Chapter 10, how is Victor feeling? Why does Shelley include the poem? • Describe the encounter between Victor & his monster (Chapter 10, pages 86-89); what is discussed? Find all religious imagery…analyze its purpose. • Describe and analyze the monster’s first encounters with humans. What is Mary Shelley’s message here?

23. Group Work • Who is Robert Walton? What does his crew think of him? What is his purpose in the story? Describe his feelings toward Victor. Why does Mary Shelley use the narrative structure of the letter-writing? • Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1 & 2). What was Victor’s mom like? How is Victor different from Elizabeth? (p. 22) • Find several instances of Victor’s hubris (p.39 and earlier). Where does this stem from? How does it lead to obsession? • Describe in detail the creation of the monster. How does Victor feel before, during, and after the process?

24. Who is Robert Walton? What does his crew think of him? What is his purpose in the story? Describe his feelings toward Victor. Why does Mary Shelley use the narrative structure of the letter-writing? • Describe the Frankenstein family (Chapters 1 & 2). What was Victor’s mom like? How is Victor different from Elizabeth? (p. 22) • Find several instances of Victor’s hubris (p.39 and earlier). Where does this stem from? How does it lead to obsession? • Describe in detail the creation of the monster. How does Victor feel before, during, and after the process? • How are Mary Shelley’s descriptions of Nature quintessentially Romantic? Find at least 4 instances. In the beginning of Chapter 10, how is Victor feeling? Why does Shelley include the poem? • Describe the encounter between Victor & his monster (Chapter 10, pages 86-89); what is discussed? Find all religious imagery…analyze its purpose. • As the monster observes the poor family, why/how does he grow to appreciate/love them? Describe the family.